Charles Dickens S Great Expectations

Presents a collection of interpretations of Charles Dickens's novel, Great expectations.

Great Expectations is written by English author Charles Dickens. The book was published serially in the journal All the Year Round in 1860–61 and issued in book form in 1861. The novel traces the prospects of a poor young man — Pip — who is educated as a gentleman of “great expectations.” Written in the first-person narrative, the story tells the saga of Pip (Philip Pirrip) who is looked after by his disagreeable sister and her sweet-natured husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. One day, the young Pip helps an escaped convict. Later on, Abel Magwitch, the convict he once aided dies awaiting trial after Pip is unable to help him a second time. It was Joe who rescued Pip from despair and nursed him back to health. Like David Copperfield, the novel draws on parts of Dickens’s own personality and experience. Many consider Great Expectations as the most finely achieved novel by Dickens. Pip, the main protagonist, is explored with great subtlety, and his development through a childhood and youth is traced sympathetically.

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel and his penultimate completed novel; a bildungsroman which depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. It is set among marshes in Kent, and in London, in the early to mid-1800s, and contains some of Dickens' most memorable scenes, including the opening, in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty; prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the kind and generous blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations is popular both with readers and literary critics, and has been translated into many languages, and adapted numerous times into various media. Upon its release, the novel received near universal acclaim. Thomas Carlyle spoke disparagingly of "all that Pip's nonsense". Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, as "All of one piece and consistently truthfull." During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased with public response to Great Expectations and its sales; when the plot first formed in his mind, he called it "a very fine, new and grotesque idea".

Great Expectations (1861), one of Dickens s later novels is more mature and serious than his earlier works and less harsh and critical of Victorian society that Dickens is known to caricature. This novel, whose hero Pip is an orphan, reads more like a detective story. The story opens with little Pip meeting an escaped convict in the churchyard on a cold December evening in an almost surreal setting. As the story unfolds, we find Pip asked to wait upon a strange old lady, Miss Havisham, and becoming infatuated with her beautiful ward, Estella. Soon thereafter, Pip inherits a handsome property left to him by an unknown benefactor. He leaves for London, soon forgets his childhood friends and leads a life of leisure. After Pip s twenty-fifth birthday, his benefactor makes himself known and Pip realises the irony of his good fortune. With the unravelling of his own position, Pip grows in moral stature. Great Expectations is the story of Pip s coming of age.

"Great Expectations" is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mastery and a profound examination of moral values. Here, some of Dickens's most memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shaped Dickens's searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class.

As Mary Hammond observes in her wide-ranging publishing history of the novel, Great Expectations' life has extended far beyond the literary Anglophone world and owes a great deal to a particular moment in the mid-Victorian publishing industry. Her book features an exhaustive survey of the novel's different appearances in serial, book and dramatic form and is enhanced by appendices with archival information, contemporary reviews and a comprehensive bibliography of editions and adaptations.

A reissue of the three-volume first book edition (1861) of one of Dickens' greatest novels.

Great Expectations is the story of Pip, an orphan boy adopted by a blacksmith's family, who has good luck and great expectations, and then loses both his luck and his expectations. Through this rise and fall, however, Pip learns how to find happiness. He learns the meaning of friendship and the meaning of love and, of course, becomes a better person for it.The story opens with the narrator, Pip, who introduces himself and describes a much younger Pip staring at the gravestones of his parents. This tiny, shivering bundle of a boy is suddenly terrified by a man dressed in a prison uniform. The man tells Pip that if he wants to live, he'll go down to his house and bring him back some food and a file for the shackle on his leg.Pip runs home to his sister, Mrs. Joe Gragery, and his adoptive father, Joe Gragery. Mrs. Joe is a loud, angry, nagging woman who constantly reminds Pip and her husband Joe of the difficulties she has gone through to raise Pip and take care of the house. Pip finds solace from these rages in Joe, who is more his equal than a paternal figure, and they are united under a common oppression.Pip steals food and a pork pie from the pantry shelf and a file from Joe's forge and brings them back to the escaped convict the next morning. Soon thereafter, Pip watches the man get caught by soldiers and the whole event soon disappears from his young mind.Mrs. Joe comes home one evening, quite excited, and proclaims that Pip is going to "play" for Miss Havisham, "a rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house."Pip is brought to Miss Havisham's place, a mansion called the "Satis House," where sunshine never enters. He meets a girl about his age, Estella, "who was very pretty and seemed very proud." Pip instantly falls in love with her and will love her the rest of the story. He then meets Miss Havisham, a willowy, yellowed old woman dressed in an old wedding gown. Miss Havisham seems most happy when Estella insults Pip's coarse hands and his thick boots as they play.Pip is insulted, but thinks there is something wrong with him. He vows to change, to become uncommon, and to become a gentleman.Pip continues to visit Estella and Miss Havisham for eight months and learns more about their strange life. Miss Havisham brings him into a great banquet hall where a table is set with food and large wedding cake. But the food and the cake are years old, untouched except by a vast array of rats, beetles and spiders which crawl freely through the room. Her relatives all come to see her on the same day of the year: her birthday and wedding day, the day when the cake was set out and the clocks were stopped many years before; i.e. the day Miss Havisham stopped living.Pip begins to dream what life would be like if he were a gentleman and wealthy. This dream ends when Miss Havisham asks Pip to bring Joe to visit her, in order that he may start his indenture as a blacksmith. Miss Havisham gives Joe twenty five pounds for Pip's service to her and says good-bye.Pip explains his misery to his readers: he is ashamed of his home, ashamed of his trade. He wants to be uncommon, he wants to be a gentleman. He wants to be a part of the environment that he had a small taste of at the Manor House.Early in his indenture, Mrs. Joe is found lying unconscious, knocked senseless by some unknown assailant. She has suffered some serious brain damage, having lost much of voice, her hearing, and her memory. Furthermore, her "temper was greatly improved, and she was patient." To help with the housework and to take care of Mrs. Joe, Biddy, a young orphan friend of Pip's, moves into the house.The years pass quickly. It is the fourth year of Pip's apprenticeship and he is sitting with Joe at the pub when they are approached by a stranger. Pip recognizes him, and his "smell of soap," as a man he had once run into at Miss Havisham's house years before...